No matter how much you try to keep the browser bookmarks clean, inevitably they jumble up and one day you realize that you have no idea which links are working and which aren’t. This is where a small utility named AM-Deadlink comes to the rescue for Windows users which checks the links for errors. Somehow, the utility lacked an alternative in the open-source world. And this is where Bookmark Undertaker comes into picture:

(Click on the image for larger version.)

For the utility, I chose PyGTK as UI backend. For parsing the bookmarks.html files exported from Firefox, I used Beautiful Soup. The latter, I must say, made my life a lot easier by cleverly sanitizing the insanity contained in Firefox’s exported favorites, staying true to the project tagline:

You didn’t write that awful page. You’re just trying to get some data out of it. Right now, you don’t really care what HTML is supposed to look like.

Neither does this parser.

And indeed it does not.

For the time being, the application imports the bookmarks properly and displays their attributes including the favorite icons. It then checks the linked URLs for errors in a separate thread and marks them as working or non-working accordingly. Exporting the bookmarks is next on the TODO-list, while it’s possible that in future I will internationalize the application as well.